Dula-werke Dustmann & Co. Gmbh

Dula-Werke Dustmann & Co. GmbH, or Dula, is one of the leading companies for holistic shopfitting and exclusive interior design in Europe, and provides its services worldwide in more than 60 countries. Dula’s philosophy is to bring goods to life in their specific setting, combining colors, shapes, materials, light, sound, and informational displays in ways that create a holistic, multisensory shopping experience.

The company’s services include planning and design, lighting design, development, production, logistics, assembly, and general contractor responsibilities. Dula executes projects for world-famous brands and leading department stores, and provides interior design for ships, hotels, restaurants, banks, insurance companies, administrative entities, and conference rooms. Clients include big names such as Apple, BMW Group, Zara, Michael Kors, Harvey Nichols, and Harrods. The Dula Group comprises design, planning, and sales offices in Germany, Spain, Great Britain, the United States, Lithuania, France, Russia, and Dubai, as well as Dula factories in Germany, Spain, and Russia.

Because flexibility and agility are critically important to Dula’s product development and manufacturing operations, management decided to migrate from Drawbase® 2D facility layout tools to a 3D solid modeling environment more than a decade ago. While the company’s R&D department chose to standardize on SOLIDWORKS® 3D design solutions in 2006, Dula’s factories made the switch to SOLIDWORKS in 2008.

“We researched the top solid modeling systems,” recalls CAD Administrator Carsten Wesseler. “Most of the solutions didn’t work for us, so we moved to SOLIDWORKS, which we found to be faster and more secure. Our R&D group first used SOLIDWORKS to verify it was the better solution. Our standardized on SOLIDWORKS shortly thereafter.”

Dula chose to standardize on SOLIDWORKS solutions because they are easy to use and fully integrated with the PASCAM® feature-based 3D CAM system for woodworking CNC machining, a vital part of Dula’s business. The company has implemented SOLIDWORKS Standard design, SOLIDWORKS Professional design, SOLIDWORKS Premium design and analysis, the SOLIDWORKS Application Programming Interface (API), SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional product data management (PDM) software, and SOLIDWORKS Composer™ technical communication software.

More recently, Dula added SOLIDWORKS Enterprise Subscription Services (ESS) to establish a close, direct relationship with Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS. The move has maximized the effectiveness of its SOLIDWORKS solutions to support continued business growth. “We’ve found ESS to be a good value because it enables rapid response to any software issues and the ability to influence future software development based on our specific needs,” Wesseler says.

FASTER RESOLUTION OF SPRS

Since adding ESS, Dula has experienced faster resolution of software performance reports (SPRs) because the service provides 24/5 access to technical support for business-critical issues, a dedicated technical support engineer, and a dedicated technical support account manager. Faster resolution of SPRs helps Dula keep its SOLIDWORKS solutions up and running. For instance, on the release of SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional 2016 on the Windows 10 operating system, the ability to generate an automatic file name in PDM worked in all cases except on the Russian version.“With ESS, we receive priority attention on SPRs, like the issue we had with the SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional system failing to generate automatic file names on the Russian operating system,” Wesseler recounts. “That issue was resolved with a hotfix a few weeks after it was reported instead of having to wait months for the next service pack.”